idea, and began to start planning the setting up of a sustainable veterinary project out there.
For the last few days of Jacques’ visit he and I went up to stay in the house in Welham Green. We wanted to spend a few days alone together and as all the boys were away, we had the house to ourselves. We planned to make trips in to London and cook a few romantic meals, but our vision of a cosy time together was cut short when we arrived to find the boiler had broken down. With no heating or hot water it was bitterly cold, and all we could do was to put on layers of jumpers (even Jacques felt the cold at this point) and then snuggle up together.
We had a couple of days out in London and spent our last day together studying – Jacques worked on his Masters’ dissertation and, with a zoo placement coming up, I did some frantic mugging up on birds and reptiles.
The time together was precious – we wouldn’t be seeing one another again until after I graduated in July so we were facing a six-month parting, our longest ever. On our last night we talked and agreed that, wherever we ended up, it would be together.
I found it hard every time I had to say goodbye to Jacques, but this time was awful. I drove him to the airport and we hugged goodbye, both of us struggling not to cry. Jacques always turned as he headed through security and said, ‘You have to go now.’ I would turn and walk away, but then I’d turn back and watch him until he disappeared. This time I sobbed, and I was still crying when I got back to my car. The next few months felt very bleak; I was facing several tough months of work and revision, all without him.
I drove down the motorway feeling really dismal, but when I got home there was cheering news. There had been a call to say that Clunky had settled into his foster home and had received medical treatment just in time to save his sight. It was heartening news. Clunky had his happy ending, and I felt sure Jacques and I would, too.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Grumpy Lizards and Misty-eyed Gorillas
I had a fair bit of wildlife experience from South Africa, but I wanted to get more exotic animal experience in Britain. I was keen to see what it was like to work with the same animals I’d been around in their natural habitats, and how they had adapted to captivity.
Zoo placements are hard to come by, so I was very excited when I was offered a week’s work experience at a local zoo in Kent.
As the zoo was so close to where Ross was studying I went to stay with him for the week. He was in his last year at university and was living in a small house that he shared with a few other students, who never seemed to be there. The house was down a little side road in the middle of a row of terraced houses. It was tall and narrow, with four floors. Ross’s bedroom was right next to the communal kitchen, which also doubled as their sitting room and dining room, while the bathroom just off it was the laundry room and shower room. I didn’t find this particularly strange as I was used to student houses where limited space meant rooms had to serve several functions. In my second year at university my bedroom was also the sitting room and the kitchen was also the dining room, even though there was barely space for two people in it, let alone a table.
No student house tends to have room for guests, unless they like to kip on the floor, but luckily for me, in Ross’s house there was a basement, which they didn’t use. I imagined it was going to be cold and damp when he first mentioned it, but actually that’s where the heating was, and they had a comfy sofa-bed down there, so I was very happy.
I left early on Monday morning for the zoo. I had no idea how long it would take me to get there, and I didn’t feel like panicking while sitting in rush hour traffic, so in the end I was twenty minutes early. I had no idea where to go, but you had to go through the gift shop to get to the park, so I started there. The woman in charge said she’d radio to find out where I should be, and ten minutes later a girl with a blonde bob arrived. She’d clearly run all the way as she was out of breath.
‘Jo? I’m Gemma. I’m one of the vets here. And I’m late for the morning rounds. Jump in the jeep with me and let’s go. I’ll fill you in on the way.’
As we drove, Gemma explained how the days worked at the zoo. The morning round was filled with routine veterinary treatments, such as worming and collecting faecal samples, plus occasional emergencies that had arisen overnight. That usually finished around 10am, when we would go back to the lab. For the next few hours, we would do lab work, which involved a lot of faecal egg counts, and occasionally a post mortem, as it was a requirement for every animal that died at the zoo, even when the cause of death seemed obvious. That would take us to lunch time, when I would be free to walk around the park, or relax for an hour. In the afternoon, we would carry out planned procedures and do afternoon rounds, visiting every department and looking at any animals they were concerned about.
Morning rounds that day began in the reptile house, where there were six small tortoises, a basilisk – a small Central American lizard that has fins on its head and back, and a rhino iguana, which is a huge lizard, about a metre long, with jaws strong enough to break your bones if he decided he didn’t like you. Our job was to worm them all with help from the reptile keeper, Dan.
Worming is a routine procedure that has to be done for all animals in captivity, whether they are zoo animals, farm animals, or dogs and cats, because living in a limited space, compared with the wild, means a high concentration of animals, a lot of faeces and, as a result, higher numbers of worms.
I thought we were going to put a stomach tube into the tortoises, as that’s generally what’s done in small animal practice, but it turned out we were going to inject the wormer into dead baby mice, known as pinkies, which the tortoises would eat. It meant less man-handling, as the zoo’s policy was not to handle the animals unless absolutely necessary.
While I understood the principle, and I’m not a squeamish person, the whole pinkie operation was pretty off-putting. But once we’d injected the wormer into the pinkies and dropped them into the cage, those tortoises moved so fast it was extraordinary, gathering around us like a pack of begging dogs.
We also had to worm the rhino iguana. He was called Crunch, and crunch he certainly would do if you got your hands anywhere close to his mouth. Unfortunately there was no equivalent to the pinkies for him – he would need to be handled, and the wormer had to be poured down his throat. This wasn’t going to be easy because he was notoriously bad-tempered and didn’t like anyone coming into his enclosure. He was fiercely territorial, and I was told to watch from the other side of the wall, as he didn’t know me and might get even grumpier if I approached. Given the power of his jaws I was happy to sit this one out. Dan, who was about my age, walked slowly up to Crunch, talking to him softly so that he wouldn’t be startled. Crunch’s gaze fixed on him as he came closer, and he gave Dan a few head bobs to try to intimidate him. Dan ignored him, moved behind him and with one quick pounce restrained Crunch by gripping behind his head and around his abdomen. Cue Gemma, who had a syringe with a strong metal tube on the end that she had to put down his throat, to squirt in the worming solution. It had to be metal otherwise he would just have bitten through it. As it was, Crunch decided that he wasn’t going to play along and clamped his jaws shut. It was a good ten minutes before Gemma could prise them open wide enough to get the metal tube in, while Dan continued to hang on to him from behind, but she managed eventually.
Finally, it was the turn of the basilisk, but he was nowhere in sight. Clearly he had seen what was going on and hidden himself. I was absolutely no help as I didn’t even know what a basilisk looked like. I presumed it was a lizard, but I had never seen, or even heard of them before. So I tried to be as helpful as I could, pretending to know what I was looking for, in the hope that if I came across it, it would either be obvious, or it would suddenly move and catch
